Fr. Adam Voisin's Stuff
Homily for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The great English author, G. K. Chesterton, said that "original sin is the one doctrine for which we have overwhelming empirical evidence." You don't need anyone to tell you about it, we all know it. We all experience it in our bones. It's that experience we have in life that something's just not quite right. Everything within us is bent or twisted or it's not the way things should be. We all experience this in our mind, our heart, our body. Something's just not quite right. It wasn't like this in the beginning. When God created Adam and Eve, they didn't have the original sin until they ate the fruit and then they kind of messed it up for the rest of us. Nevertheless, we're still created good. We're still created in God's image and likeness, meaning that we have intellect and will. That's what it means to be created in God's image and likeness. We have a rational intellect and we have a free will, unlike the animals. We can reason through things and freely choose them and yet we find that our intellect is darkened and our will is weakened. The intellect, our rational intellect, its job is to apprehend the truth. That's really what the mind is all about, to apprehend the truth. So we learn two plus two equals four. That's true. Our mind knows it and that's what the mind does. When it comes to the moral life, it's to apprehend what's truly good and what's truly bad, to see what is the right thing to do, what is the wrong thing to do, and yet because of this darkening of our intellect, we often mess those up. We can see something good, but actually think it's bad, or we see something bad and think it's good, so we have to get our mind straight. We can, something good, well, coming to Mass is good, right? You're here, it's good, and you're here. But there's a lot of people that would say, "No, going to Mass would be bad. I've got better things, more good things that I'll go do." So someone can see something good as not good, and on the other hand, we can see something bad and see it as good. So think of a bank robber, right? A bank robber stealing banks is obviously, robbing from banks is obviously a bad thing to do. Right? So, but why does the bank robber do it? He perceives a good. The money, right, getting the money from the bank, there's an old adage in philosophy that everything we do is ultimately in pursuit of a good, whether real or perceived. Our job is to know it's really good, and not follow things that are bad, but we think are good. At really any time we choose sin, we're choosing something that is bad, but we perceive it as a good. It's going to do some good in my life to commit this sin. So our minds are darkened, but our wills are weakened too, and we all know this, right? This is why it's hard to do the right thing. It's hard to not have that second bowl of ice cream, right? Our will is weak. It wants the ice cream. In my case, it's not the ice cream. It's Doritos is my weakness. See, my mind knows that Doritos are not a health food, and they're not good for me. My mind knows that, so it's correctly apprehending that Doritos are not good for me, but my will is weak, and I have a second bowl. So our will is weak. That's why we're lazy, and we procrastinate, and don't do what we're supposed to do. Here I think about St. Paul, the great apostle, St. Paul. He wrote about his struggles with this, too, in his letter to the Romans, chapter 7. He says, "I don't know why. I don't do what I know I should do, and I do what I know I shouldn't do." Can you relate? I can. Then he speaks about this war that he experiences within him, between what he calls the spirit and the flesh. The spirit is what God wants him to do or not do, and the flesh is these disordered passions that we find within ourselves. We all find these, too. That makes it even harder to do the right thing, because we're subject to our pride and our ego, and our greed, and our lust, and our jealousy, and our envy, and our anger, and our temper, and all of these things, these disordered passions within us make it even harder to choose what's good and do the right thing. And then we also experience original sin in our bodies, because we know our bodies. We get sick, we get injured, we get hurt, we're weak, and then we die. There's original sin. Can you see why Chesterton says we have overwhelming evidence for the doctrine of original sin? Even though, and people have known this all through all of human history, even if they didn't use that language of original sin, everybody's always known this. Do we see it on full display in our readings today? In our first reading from the book of Wisdom, we hear the ungodly, the unrighteous, they say, "Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions." You think, "Who would do that?" Like who would see a good person and want to tear him down? That would certainly never happen, especially on the Internet. It never ever happens. No, no, no, we all do it. We love doing it. You know, if someone's doing good or achieving something, we love it. We love it if they get torn down. Makes us feel better about ourselves, eh? You know when you go to the store and there's the magazine rank and all those tabloids that have these two actors got divorced, they put it right on the front. Then I say, "Yeah, I'll spend my hard-earned money so I can delight in their misery for the rest of the afternoon reading it." We love it, seeing people get torn down. There's Original Sin. In our second reading from the letter of St. James, it's a beautiful book to read, he says, "Look, where there is envy and selfish ambition coming out of our Original Sin, where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind." He says, "Those conflicts, those disputes among you, where do they come from?" Well, they come from inside. They come from all of it. It's all of this brokenness within us. He says, "The wisdom from above, from God, what does it look like? It's pure, peaceable, gentle, docile, full of mercy, good fruits, without any uncertainty or hypocrisy." He goes on and he says, "Those wars, those conflicts among you, don't they come from your cravings that are at war with Indians?" If I just look at the last argument you had with someone, why did that happen? Coming out of this brokenness within us, our ego and our pride and all that kind of stuff. We certainly see all of this on display in our gospel. Remember last week Jesus predicted they're going down to Jerusalem, Jesus predicts that he's going to go there, going to be betrayed, he's going to be killed, and on the third day be raised. And we remember Peter's blundering response and ends up getting called Satan. Today Jesus again, for the second time, predicts that he's going to Jerusalem and he says he's going to be betrayed into the hands of men and they will kill him and after three days and three days after being killed, he will rise again. And again we have a blundering knucklehead response, these apostles, it's cartoonishly funny, their response. What are they doing? They're arguing amongst themselves, who's the best? They're blundering knuckleheads and I'm sure when they're doing that they're not gathered together saying no, I think you're the best, no I think you're the best, no they're saying I'm the best, I'm the greatest, I think who would do that? No one would ever do something like that, you know I know someone who does this all the time is super irritating, I really wish you'd stop, the only problem is I'm really close to this guy, because it's this guy who does that, about a year and a half ago we had a gathering with some priests from the area with the bishops, it was part of the forwarding Christ thing the bishops are doing, I spoke briefly about that last week. So we've got about 12 priests with the bishops and the bishop asks us, he says what should we be doing in our parishes to advance, you know, to move forward with our parishes and the mission of the church, you know what every single one of us did? Every priest who had a chance to speak, what kind of went around the room, every one of us talked about all the good things I'm doing, and guess who also did that, this guy? And I'm proud of all the good stuff we do at Regina Mundi, but I went home after the meeting and I was thinking about that and it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was exactly like the apostles in the gospel today. Now I didn't come out and directly say I'm the greatest, I just said my ideas are the greatest, it's close enough, you can find all kinds of ways we do this, you know, asserting ourselves, I'm the greatest, I've got the best ideas, my opinions are right. So here we are, hey, here's Original Sin, we all, we all got it, now we actually don't have Original Sin, if you've been baptized baptism forgives the Original Sin, but we still carry the wounds of it, the effects, the lingering effects of it. When I was a kid, this won't surprise you, I was stupid, and I broke this wrist twice doing stupid things, I won't tell you what they were, and when they put my wrist back together, you put the cast on, they didn't quite set the bone right, so if you look under an X-ray it's a little bit kind of kitty-wampus in there, I get most of the mobility out of my wrist, but it's not perfect, so you can see here I've been healed, but there's still a lingering effect of the wound inside, and that's what Original Sin is like, we've been forgiven of it, but we still carry the effects of it, and again everybody through all of history has known this, everybody has experienced Original Sin and tried to come up with solutions for it, hey? So you look back at the old tiny Greek philosophers, think like Plato, Aristotle, really they were old tiny self-help gurus, they knew the problem too, and they're proposing well here's what you should do, so you think of Aristotle, he says pursue a life of virtue, and you will attain human flourishing, there's a lot of truth to that, all through history there's been people, philosophers, all kinds of people proposing the solution to this brokenness, this Original Sin within us, in the Enlightenment period the solution was political, all we need are better political structures, and then everyone will start to behave themselves, how's that working out? If you go to the bookstore, Amazon, something like this, you'll find tons of self-help books, hey? And there's a lot of good stuff in there, and I'm not denigrating all of them, anything like that, but the big problem is through all of history it's never worked, that was that we can fix ourselves, we're kind of stuck in the situation, we need somebody else to intervene and heal us, and put us back together, and we're fortunate that we have somebody who came to do that, Jesus Christ came and died on the cross to forgive us of our sins, to reconcile us with God, to give us peace with God and peace in our hearts, to heal our hearts and put them back together, Jesus is our Savior, he came to save us, our English word save is based on the Latin word salus, and salus means healing or health, Jesus is our salivator, the health bringer, the healing bringer, he is our savior, only he by his grace in our lives, starting at baptism and living a life of grace can knit us back together. Now to be sure we got to do stuff, he's not going to do it if we're just sitting around doing nothing, but he gives us the grace to cooperate with him and put us back together, and that's why this whole walk of discipleship with Christ is the good news, because we're not stuck, we're not stuck in this brokenness, it doesn't have to be that way, he's given us the better path, without all the conflicts in disorder and dysfunction that all of this creates around us in our lives, and we do that by adopting, appropriating his teachings in our life, when you come across the teachings of Jesus in the scriptures or the rest of the New Testament, don't just hear them like, "Oh, those are like good ideas, they're nice lessons," no, we ask, "How can I really live this in my own life?" And Jesus gives us the grace to actually do that, and that starts putting us back together, returning us to who God really wants us to be, who He created us to be. We hear just last week and this week, a couple of examples of this, Jesus after the disciples blow at both times, He gives a lesson, whoever, last week we heard Him say, "Whoever wants to be my follower, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me, whoever wants to save their life, whoever wants to be healed, they'll have to lose their life, we have to give away all the dysfunction, the passions, the sins that we get attached to, whoever wants to, whoever loses their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, we'll save it, we'll be healed." Jesus gives similar counsel today after the apostles blow it, you want to be first, whoever wants to be first, whoever wants to be greatest, what do you got to do, you got to be last of all and servant of all, not pushing ourselves first, being last of all, serving others. At the beginning of Mass, when we come and tell the Lord, we know we're sinners, we hear the priest, our minister say, "You are sent to heal the contrary to heart." That's what this is all about, He wants to heal us, of all of this dysfunction we experience in our lives, in our hearts, in our minds, in our will, but also our bodies, yeah, we'll die, but what's the promise? Even our bodies, He'll put back together in the resurrection from the dead and it's not there for no reason that when we receive the Eucharist, every time we receive His body and blood and holy communion, we tell the Lord, "I'm not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed." [BLANK_AUDIO]